The ASUS enrichment center would like to remind you that the companion core will never threaten you and, in fact, cannot speak. In the event that the companion core does speak, the ASUS enrichment center urges you to disregard its advice.

Machines don't get sick, they don't take holidays, and they don't complain. Most important to business is the fact that they're cheaper.

Machines don't get sick? Tell that to the infrastructure in Iran taken down by stuxnet, or to the thousands of cars with critical system failures due to normal wear-and-tear (blown head gaskets, leaky hoses, etc). The danger of automation is that machines can make large, expensive mistakes very quickly, so you risk getting eaten alive by both maintenance costs and "oops" factors.

I blame a bad encounter with one of his cousin Scott's evil exes.

Online Pass/Sony Pass is nothing more than a money grab.

EA and Sony want you to believe that a used copy of the game incurs them additional costs in addition to whatever costs were generated by the first buyer. Is this true?

Suppose N is the set of copies of any given game that have been sold to customers. When a copy is traded in to GameStop, the cardinality of N drops by 1 by definition. When that used copy is sold again, the cardinality of N increases by 1, again by definition. A game cannot be classified as "used" if it has not previously been in N. Therefore, a used sale does not change the cardinality of N, and so the costs incurred by EA or Sony do not change. It costs them the same to support |N| copies of the game, regardless of who owns those copies.

Supporting Online Pass or Sony Pass is supporting nothing more than corporate greed.

Why are we oohing and ahhing over the Civilization 4 title screen?

#firstworldproblems

JavaDoc comments in your code would be a good start.

To quote HTTYD: "Blind spot, yes! Deaf spot, not so much!"

All the fancy anti-IR plating ain't gonna do much when the sound of yer diesel engine is more than enough to let the enemy know you're coming.

Starz content on Netflix Streaming has always been horrible quality. Fire up Tangled, skip to the scene where the dam breaks, and listen in horror to the audio compression artifacts. I've got pretty low standards of quality, and even I'm embarrassed for Starz.

Close, but no cigar. It's capital-s-spider-dash-capital-m-man. Spider-Man.

Netflix contracts with companies such as Akamai, called content delivery networks. These companies pay ISPs to co-locate their servers so that each ISP gets its own local cache of the content served by their clients. And yes, this means that the Netflix content you watch, which counts towards your monthly cap, is being served *locally*.

Customers pay ISPs to access their network. The CDN pays the ISP for the bandwidth they use to transfer their data to their servers, and the CDNs are paid by the content providers, who are, in turn, also paid by customers.

Every step of the delivery between Netflix and the customers is completely paid for, yet ISPs want to whine and cry about how Netflix is harming their network. More like anti-competitive posturing, since the ISPs doing the biggest whining happen to be owned by big media corporations.

Netflix already does this. Or rather, they contract with companies who do this (that's what a CDN is -- Content Delivery Network). The problem is that, in implementing the caps, ISPs are lumping in last-mile bandwidth that has almost no marginal cost with actual Internet-bound traffic that does have a marginal cost via upstream provider bandwidth charges.

I know for myself, that between an OTA antenna, Netflix Instant, and Hulu, I have everything I need. My Netflix sub is the closest I have ever come to paying for TV.

As more and more ISPs implement caps, I think the next step is going to be a home caching server. I.e. for Netflix, you could set your monthly cap and tell it what % to use, then it would download shows from your Instant Queue to the cache server during off-peak hours. Then, streaming devices would get the data over your LAN rather than across the Internet. The only traffic generated during viewing would be the DRM exchanges to ensure you are authorized.

However, if ISPs were honest (ha!) they would exempt content that is delivered via CDN (i.e. Akamai) because the only bandwidth used is "last mile" bandwidth--the bandwidth between the CDN server and the Internet is already paid for by the CDN provider!

Does this mean we can finally get an iTunes-alike that can work with iTunes 7+ library sharing?

I did the calculations, and the volume of New Jerusalem that is described as descending to Earth toward the end of Revelation is roughly half the volume of the moon. Thus the "moon turning to blood" earlier in Revelation is, in fact, New Jerusalem breaking out of its lunar shell and beginning its descent through the atmosphere.